Trump’s Foreign Policy Remains Muddled

Insanity: President Trump doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

By Dr. Ron Paul

After a week of insisting that a meeting with Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Argentina was going to happen, President Donald Trump at the last minute sent out a statement explaining that due to a Russia-Ukraine dispute in the Sea of Azov he would no longer be willing to meet his Russian counterpart.

According to Trump, the meeting had to be cancelled because the Russians seized three Ukrainian naval vessels in Russian waters that refused to follow instructions from the Russian military. But as Pat Buchanan wrote in a recent column: How is this little dispute thousands of miles away any of our business?

Unfortunately, it is “our business” because of President Barack Obama’s foolish idea to overthrow a democratically elected, pro-Russia government in Ukraine in favor of what his administration believed would be a “pro-Western” and “pro-NATO” replacement. In short, the Obama administration did openly to Ukraine what his Democratic Party claims without proof the Russians did to the United States: meddled in a vote.

U.S. interventionism in Ukraine led to the 2014 coup and many dead Ukrainians. Crimea’s majority-Russian population held a referendum and decided to re-join Russia rather than remain in a “pro-West” Ukraine that immediately began discriminating against them. Why would anyone object to people opting out of abusive relationships?

What is most disappointing about Trump’s foreign policy is that it didn’t have to be this way. He ran on a platform of America first, ending foreign wars, NATO skepticism, and better relations with Russia. Americans voted for this policy. He had a mandate, a rejection of Obama’s destructive interventionism. But he lost his nerve.

Instead of being the president who ships lethal weapons to the Ukrainian regime, instead of being the president who insists that Crimea remain in Ukraine, instead of being the president who continues policies the American people clearly rejected at the ballot box, Trump could have blamed the Ukraine-Russia mess on the failed Obama foreign policy and charted a very different course. What flag flies over Crimea is none of our business. We are not the policemen of the world, and candidate Trump seemed to have understood that.

But now Trump’s in a trap. He was foolish enough to believe that Beltway foreign policy “experts” have a clue about what really is American national interest. Just this week he told The Washington Post, in response to three U.S. soldiers being killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, that he has to keep U.S. troops fighting in the longest war in U.S. history because the “experts” tell him there is no alternative.

He said, “Virtually every expert that I have and speak to says if we don’t go there, they’re going to be fighting over here. And I’ve heard it over and over again.”

That is the same bunkum the neocons sold us as they lied us into Iraq. We’ve got to fight Saddam over there or he’d soon be in our streets. These “experts” are worthless, yet for some reason Trump cannot break free of them.

Well, here’s some unsolicited advice to the president: Listen to the people who elected you, who are tired of the U.S. as the world’s police force. Let Ukraine and Russia work out their own problems. Give all your “experts” a pink slip and start over with a real pro-American foreign policy: non-interventionism.

Ron Paul, a former U.S. representative from Texas and medical doctor, continues to write his weekly column for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, online at www.ronpaulinstitute.org.